Monday, October 1, 2018

Do you even remember MySpace? Were you active on it at all? I was. It was the big social media website that was popular leading up to FaceBook.

It was a peripheral service somehow of the music industry. I don’t know it’s genesis, but by the time that I was on it, it was busy and buzzing with activity. The thing about MySpace at that time was that you could customize your profile page. And though I know close to nothing about writing code, for it took HTML code to customize, I was able to get bits of code from the internet to do what I needed. There were sites dedicated to helping a person put photos and designs on their MySpace page.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

I was driving two days ago when I noticed to the right, out of my passenger window, a woman carrying two giant clear plastic trash-sized bags of aluminum cans. She was stepping out of a large, maybe acre-sized field at whose edge by the sidewalk was her bicycle and an attached wagon. That’s where the bags of cans were going to be placed. I then naturally took a look at the field behind her; clean as any field could be.

Friday, August 31, 2018

Have you ever thought about how incredible it is that we can hear a voice anywhere; on the radio, on a phone message, out of a crowd, and we know who it is? On the face of it, it doesn’t seem that incredible. I mean, if you know someone from their being a friend of yours, or from loving their music, or listening to their shows, you might think, “Well yeah, you hear their voice and you 'know' who it is."

Friday, July 13, 2018

Every once in a while, a person has one of those vivid memories that resides in the midst of a foggy mire. One of mine is that while I lived in the Sea Castle Apartments in Santa Monica, which was giant, Art Deco, aquamarine apartment building, and formerly an old-timey beach club (“The Breakers”), I got to see one of the most memorable fireworks shows ever.

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Something that is really strange to me is that a lot of people follow others who they don’t like and don’t agree with in any basic way on Twitter. For instance, take Tomi Lehren. She tweets out ultra conservative and inflammatory tweets multiple times throughout the day. Most liberals hate her Tweets and post replies to her that are vicious and venomous.

It boggles my mind why people do this. Why would you, the average person who has limited time and resources each day to deal with work and family, follow someone you really don’t like? I think it’s because people want to get themselves worked up and angry. There is no other logical reason.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

What reminds you of when you were young? Is it music? It is a smell? Is it a physical place? It is thinking or seeing someone from that time?

For me, it’s mostly the first two or three. Music shoots me back to a time so quickly that it’s like some sort of emotional wormhole for me. I think this is true for a lot of people. For some reason, music, smells, and places are able to tap into a person’s memory extremely directly.

Music is just an incredible thing, isn’t it? I wrote another blog entry a while back called, “Time After Time,” in which I described the strange phenomenon of how a song can whisk me away so quickly, it makes my head spin. There can be something in the musical arrangement or in the words and melody that just cut right through to me riding in my ex-girlfriend’s father’s Trans Am, or to me sitting on the ledge of The Sea Castle, an apartment I had on the sand of Santa Monica, or of finishing the last few miles of one of the twenty-six full length marathons I have run in my past. Songs have the effect of almost softening up my soul, bringing down the defenses that I’ve normally put up to blur out the memories’ acuity. The music allows me to feel the feelings again, if only so momentarily.